Golf cart parades are a key part of the political pageantry of the Villages, a 130,000-resident retirement colossus in Sumter County, Florida, often perkily described as America’s fastest-growing hometown. It’s a charming tradition, as the golf carts, festooned with signs and patriotic bunting, proceed grandly down the quiet avenues of the community. But this year many of the established ways of turning out the vote—the golf cart parades, door knocking, massive Trump rallies—may be nixed due to social distancing restrictions, injecting a new note of uncertainty into a state that has raised political uncertainty to a rare art form.

Before coronavirus hit, Donald Trump was a modest favorite in Florida, a state considered critical to his political survival. Trump won Florida in 2016, albeit by the thin margins characteristic of the state, and Florida Republicans have long held significant advantages in organization and fundraising. But the president’s erratic handling of the pandemic and the relative popularity of Joe Biden have changed the political calculus. Recent polls have given the Democratic challenger a small but consistent lead—movement driven largely by shifting views among voters over the age of 65. Senior voters are always crucial, as they vote at higher rates than any other age group. But they’re particularly important in Florida, where they make up almost 21% of the population, a higher percentage than every other state except Maine. In the latest Quinnipiac poll for Florida, Biden held a 10-point lead among respondents over 65. It’s an astonishing figure, given that in 2016, Trump carried the state’s seniors by 17 points. Other recent polls haven’t quite matched the Quinnipiac numbers, but they have shown substantial movement among seniors toward Biden. Given that Trump won Florida by just nearly 113,000 votes, but carried seniors handily by some 330,000, even small shifts in senior voting could turn Florida blue in 2020.

The roots of senior discontent aren’t hard to find. Nora Patterson, a longtime Republican county commissioner and former mayor of Sarasota, told me that the “old people are all hidden away, fearing for their lives.” Florida has so far been spared the ravages of coronavirus compared to New York or New Jersey, two states that tend to feed Florida’s population, but concern remains high: According to the same Quinnipiac poll, 77% of seniors fear hospitalization for themselves or their family members. And seniors aren’t giving Trump high marks for his erratic handling of coronavirus. As Patterson put it to me, “I don’t know what to think about Trump because he changes his mind every three days.” In regard to the handling of the COVID-19 crisis, Trump’s polling numbers among seniors in Florida are not terrible in the abstract (50% disapprove, 47% approve), but they run 13 points behind those of Governor Ron DeSantis and far behind other governors. When asked who should decide when to lift stay-at-home orders, 86% of seniors picked state governors over the president. Most important, seniors now favor Biden over Trump by nine points when it comes to handling a crisis, largely because Biden’s reputation for steady leadership and truth-telling is significantly stronger than Trump’s.

Biden may have a momentary edge, especially among the critical constituency of older voters. But most political analysts in Florida are still reluctant to give early polls too much weight. In my conversations, the state was routinely described as a toss-up, or in the best formulation, “the swingiest of the swing states,” per Charles Zelden, a professor of political science at Nova Southeastern University near Miami. This view reflects the tortured history of close elections in Florida—three statewide contests in 2018 alone went to recount—but it also reflects how deep political tribalism runs these days, coloring how people perceive the current crisis. Chris Stanley, the Democratic Party leader in the Villages, described to me how Democrats in the area are sheltering in place while Republicans are off golfing or holding cocktail parties in their driveways. In the Quinnipiac poll, Democrats in Florida were more than twice as likely as Republicans to say they were very concerned that they or someone they knew would be infected with coronavirus. As with mask-wearing, the sociocultural divide among blues and reds has supplanted even public health guidelines.

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The effectiveness of changing political tactics is another unknown for 2020. Stanley is already switching her emphasis to social media. “We have to learn how to reach out and touch people without actually touching them,” she told me. The Trump campaign is also reportedly readying new strategies, including handing out red, Trump-branded masks to supporters (an odd choice given the president’s and vice president’s unwillingness to don masks themselves). The Trump camp, aware of the president’s polling slide, has declared May 2020 “Older Americans Month,” and is planning a series of public events focused on seniors. “We have data that shows all Americans, seniors included, can see the president’s leadership on the coronavirus,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaughtold the Wall Street Journal last week. Bill Nelson, the former U.S. senator and a longtime fixture in Florida politics, told me he’s confident in his candidate but still wary of Republican advantages in fundraising and their penchant for dirty tricks: “Except for the excessive amount of money to smear Biden, he is the man who can win.”

The likely surge in mail-in voting also adds an element of unpredictability to the race. Compared to most states, Florida is relatively experienced with mail-in voting, with about a third of all votes cast through the absentee process in 2018. But mail ballots still pose challenges: They’re rejected at about 10 times the rate of in-person voting, and the tabulation of mail votes is far slower due to the need to authenticate signatures. Experts told me that because of the virus, the number of mail ballots could easily double this fall. In early April, the head of the association that represents all 67 county election supervisors wrote to DeSantis, telling him they were not prepared for a massive surge in mail voting, and requesting resources and flexibility to establish longer voting periods. Even if that happens, it seems quite possible that millions of mail ballots could overwhelm the post office and election officials—a prospect made more daunting by the fact that both campaigns will be on high alert for fraud.

It’s Florida, so if things can go wrong, they generally do. Recounts are a regular component of Florida elections, and lawsuits and hard feelings inevitably follow. Toss in a deadly pandemic, a volatile and paranoid incumbent, and a deeply suspicious electorate, and you’ll get one memorable election night. It “may be worse than Bush v. Gore,” Zelden predicted, and we may all be spending November and December in Florida again.